Plex Media Center for OS X Leopard

We can’t help it, writing plug-ins is addictive. Here are a bunch of new ones to keep you happy and entertained in front of your TV. A step closer to killing cable?

Charlie Rose has thousands of hours of interviews with highly interesting people. Everyone from J.J. Abrams to Sean Penn to Yo-Yo Ma has been on his show.

The Comedy Central plug-in, written by Scott, provides lots of stand up comedy, roasts, and episodes from shows on that channel.

This next one was requested on the forums, and was quite simple to code. There is a ton of great news content on here for fans of the New York Times.

Written by Gordon Johnston, who’s been kicking some serious ass, the NBC plug-in offers hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of programming, from old-school shows like the A-Team to the latest season of ER.

This last one is my favorite, being that I’m a big fan of indie music. Recommended if you like the Pitchfork Media plug-in, the site has lots of great up and coming artists.

We’re coming to the end of the Plex/Seven series, so we’re primarily focused on bug-fixes, but we did find the time to add a few new things for your enjoyment. Many, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this release. In the next few days, we’re going to release a few new plug-ins (and updates to existing ones) that make use of new features/bugfixes in this release, so be sure to update as soon as you can! The release can be downloaded here.

• NEW: One of the complaints we’ve heard is that the visualizers available with Plex, while cool, sometimes cause seizures in kids and household pets. Others say that it leads them to look forward to 4:20 PM. In any case, James and Mike B (of MediaStream fame) teamed up to bring you a sexy new option: The Now Playing visualizer. Select it just as you would any other visualizer, and take it for a spin.

• NEW: We’ve added support for ratings in Plex Media Server content. So in the next revision of the Netflix plug-in, for example, you’ll now see star ratings, as you will in another new plug-in that will be released shortly.

• NEW: Do you ever find yourself struggling to shuffle a playlist, or play an album straight through, by displaying the playlist, toggling settings, and then switching back, having forgotten what you were doing in the first place? James added a convenient Shuffle item on the context menu to make that struggle a thing of the past. Together with the new Now Playing visualizer, we’re hoping you find music playing just a little bit easier this release.

• NEW: New iLife art (thanks to the talented tassitassi). You see some of it peeking out from the screenshot above. (Note: you’ll have to whack your existing cached art at ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Thumbnails/Programs/Fanart/)
• NEW: Our friend Kent has been hard at work on analyzing our user data. Among other things, he’s discovered that our Swedish users rock! There are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country. He compiled this data by looking at the Sparkle update requests. To make his job a bit easier, we’ve added a token to each update request that’s unique for each computer. We’re sending a one-way hash of the computer’s MAC address, which when broken down into plain English means that (a) we’ll be able to figure how many total computers are running Plex and (b) we can’t use the data to obtain any information about your computer.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in this release:

• FIX: The context menu was broken for the Favorites section.
• FIX: We weren’t saving the ‘show extensions’ setting correctly in advanced settings.
• FIX: James fixed a long-standing (since Plex/Five) scraper hang with tvshow.nfo.
• FIX: We got a patch from rgrove (thanks!) that ensures that LAN cache settings are used for SMB shares.
• FIX: Caching was disabled, which caused no end of trouble playing back Internet content.
• FIX: We added Lanczos back to the OSD upscaling menu.
• FIX: We increased the size of the default fonts. I have to personally apologize for that, apparently I ate too many carrots as a baby.
• FIX: Crash/hang when exiting after playing a video.
• FIX: Also a longstanding bug, the occasional lack of GUI sounds after playing videos (thanks to Kent for helping me track this down).
• FIX: The Plex Media Server is a Universal Binary again.
• FIX: Ryan helped me fix a DTS->AC3 transcoding channel mapping bug.
• FIX: A Plex Media Server crash (when stopping a WebKit video shortly after starting) was fixed.
• FIX: We’ve made the list view give more room to text. After all, scrolling text is hard to read.

• FIX: Stopping a video with 5.1 audio could be a bit slow.
• FIX: The clock could display letters (e.g. “kk:49″). Thanks to Daniel for helping me track this one down.
• FIX: James made the thumbnail searching code respect the dvdthumbs advanced setting (so you can add support for Front Row style preview.jpg files).
• FIX: Double speed playback of 22KHz audio in videos (e.g. some FLV video).
• FIX: Enhanced the caching of directories to work well with the Plex Media Server (much quicker backing up to parent directories).
• FIX: Isaac fixed a few confusing strings.
• FIX: Improved Russian strings (thanks to friendly).
• FIX: Blurry fanart. Thanks to tassitassi for bringing it to my attention and to jmarshall for the fix).

We also added a few new Media Server plug-in features and fixed some bugs:

• NEW: Support for typing a string in the site config (requested by Rick, useful for authenticating into Flash sites).
• NEW: We allow specifying a dead zone in the seek bar site config, which can help make a tooltip disappear after a seek.
• FIX: Preferences weren’t being correctly escaped, which could lead to problems logging into Netflix, for example.

Here’s Barkley on Makena beach, gutting a beached whale.

A lot of people have been asking for this, and now your wish has been granted: Netflix on Plex. Tens of thousands of instantly playable movies, and a gorgeous interface with fanart, high resolution posters and rich metadata.

Major props to Scott for doing a brilliant job with this plug-in. He’s already hard at work at the next version.

The Netflix plug-in requires the latest version of Plex.

You also need the Silverlight plug-in installed.

As I mentioned in the last post, one of the reasons we are so excited about this latest release of Plex and the Plex Media Server is that we’ve added lots of new features in support of new plug-ins, as well as an elegant new version of the Python plug-in framework. We’re going to be releasing a bunch of new plug-ins this week, and here are the first four. N.B. Please make sure you install the latest version of Plex before installing these!

SVT Play, written by Daniel Eriksson, Mattias Norlander, and Ivar Åsell, is a lovely plug-in for Swedish speakers. The content is available for viewing outside of Sweden, which is excellent news as well. These guys did a great job with the plug-in.

We’ve been working hard for the last month and I’m really happy to finally be able to announce this next release (download here, but please read the release notes first). Besides the usual bunch of new features and bug-fixes, this release brings with it support for the next major release of our Media Server plug-in API, and this means that you’ll be seeing lots of new content in the App Store this week (and hopefully provides extra incentive to upgrade quickly!)

• NEW: Cocoa UI for advanced settings. Why should you have to edit XML files? You shouldn’t, and now you don’t have to, because the most important advanced settings are easily accessible in this advanced settings dialog that James added. The dialog is accessible via Plex > Advanced Settings… in the menu bar.

• NEW: This all started with a giant bug that Youngcho Kim posted detailing improvements that would help Korean users. Seeing as I like 돌솥 비빔밥 as much as the next guy, I read the bug, thought about it, and we decided that a lot of his suggestions were really excellent for all non-English first time Plex users. So we’ve done a few things:
  • Plex respects the language setting in the International preference pane. Whatever language your OS X applications start with, Plex will start with (assuming there’s a translation).
  • Plex respects the units setting (Metric/US) also specified in that preference pane, and these are used to determine the units for temperature and speed.
  • Plex uses the date and time formatting specified in that pane as well; for example, MediaStream uses the short time format for its clock, which you can easily configure it in a number of different ways. More importantly, it will use whatever format you have configured already.
  • Plex auto-selects the font based on your language, so if your language is configured in OS X to be Chinese, for example, it will use Arial Unicode automatically.
  • If you really want Plex to be running with different language/units than OS X, you can specify this in advanced settings (<language> tag, e.g. “en” or “it”, and <units> tag, e.g. “metric”).

• NEW: Evan Schoenberg was kind enough to add support for the IRKeyboardEmu virtual remote, which provides support for his awesome Rowmote app for the iPhone.
• NEW: SMS jump support for Harmony, to make it easy to jump around in lists (thanks to aaronjb!)
• NEW: Ryan updated our ffmpeg to v0.5 from the XBMC source, and added the new version of libfaad2 and some other patches which provide support for more formats. See his blog post for more details. The new ffmpeg adds support for WMAv2 and lots more.
• NEW: We’ve enhanced support for .dfont files, to allow specifying font variants; the skin now uses Helvetica Neue by default, except for languages whose character sets aren’t supported by that font, which use Arial Unicode. We’ve also moved to using mixed case, which we think is more readable than all-caps. (We’ve left the original font-set as “Original” for those who prefer it).

• NEW: Improved fanart images for iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture, thanks to Aargh-a-Knot.
• NEW: Support for Plex.MoveToNextScreen and Plex.MoveToPrevScreen actions, as requested by Felix Schwarz, the author of Remote Buddy.
• NEW: Finished up localization support in Plex and the Media Server so that plug-in localization works. There was already support for it in the framework, but it needed a bit of plumbing.
• NEW: James enhanced the photo text overlay so that (a) it hides after 10 seconds and (b) you can toggle it with the ‘info’ command (‘t’ on the keyboard, menu on the Apple Remote). We’ve tweaked the keymap in slideshows to be more consistent with other sections, so pressing menu displays information, holding menu returns you to the browser. Additionally, hold left and right zoom out and in, and hold play displays photo EXIF details. Also, if you just don’t want to see the overlay at all, you can hide it in the skin settings.

Lots of good fixes in this release as well.

• FIX: Allow specifying “always on” vs. “on for SD content” for software upscaling (we’ve also allowed you to select the algorithm used in the advanced settings dialog).
• FIX: If you have audio linking to system output, it restores the original setting when exiting.
• FIX: Improved support for SMI subtitles (pulled from XBMC).
• FIX: Backing up from App Store or Help brings you back to main menu.
• FIX: When upgrading, helper and Media Server sometimes didn’t get restarted. This one was driving me crazy.
• FIX: Apple Remote could drop key-presses when system was loaded (many thanks to Evan Schoenberg for the fix, this has been annoying many for quite some time).
• FIX: When using an HTTP proxy (like Glimmer Blocker), the Media Server wouldn’t play Flash content.
• FIX: Huge speed increase starting plug-ins in the Media Server on startup.
• FIX: Signature on Media Server should always be correct now, eliminating firewall warnings.
• FIX: iPhoto album ordering now exactly matches iPhoto.
• FIX: Many things restored to Mediastream which were taken out in the last version (allow hiding Movies, TV Shows, and the Quit items, back back background image folder settings, restored “hide thumbs in list view”, and put back the library button in music files).
• FIX: Sometime when displaying a slide show, moving to the next image would simply exit out of the slideshow (nice find, James!)
• FIX: HD Homerun should work now.
• FIX: Stillness sent an encoding patch and scraper updates for KinoPoisk.ru (thank you!)
• FIX: Seasons and episodes views will now display correctly for first-time users, thanks to Isaac.
• FIX: We were missing a key mapping for deleting individual video bookmarks.
• FIX: Ryan, our resident audio wizard, fixed an issue with static noise when skipping forward in an AAC 5.1 file.

And lots of changes in Plex Media Server land:

• Support for new V1 of Plex plug-in Python framework. Major cleanups and enhancements, if you thought the first version was easy to use, you’ll love what James has done with this version. We’ll have great documentation available shortly.
• Support for plug-in preference panes (and support in the V1 framework for adding preferences).
• Support for conditions in simple seek bars (i.e. for specifying that played color is *not* a given color).
• Support for sending key presses to WebKit plug-ins in site configuration.
• Support for setting cookies in site configuration.
• Support for WebKit plug-ins that change frame size.
• Support for specifying relative coordinates for cropping and mouse events (e.g. 10 pixels from the right).
• Support for Javascript seek bars, and Javascript conditions.
• Support for site configurations reading values from a plug-in’s preferences (useful when performing authentication).
• Allow manually locking plug-ins on a page, useful with authentication and some misbehaved sites.

I’ll let Barkley have the last word, as usual. Seriously, who sleeps like this?